Trump fires BLS commissioner after weak jobs report
President Donald Trump on Friday ordered the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after a stunning government report showed that hiring had slowed down significantly over the past three months.
Taking to Truth Social, he attacked Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the BLS. He claimed that the country’s jobs reports “are being produced by Biden appointee” and ordered his administration to terminate her.
“We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” Trump wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
An administration official told NBC News shortly after the post that McEntarfer had indeed been fired.
It was not immediately clear who would helm the agency. The deputy director of BLS is Bill Wiatrowsk, who took up the role during the Obama administration.
The BLS on Friday morning reported that the U.S. economy added just 73,000 jobs in July, well below estimates. It also said it had revised the May and June numbers lower by more than 200,000 jobs combined.
McEntarfer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden nominated McEntarfer in July 2023 and was confirmed by the Senate in an 86-to-8 vote (with six members not voting) in January 2024. She received overwhelming bipartisan support in the vote.
McEntarfer has spent much of her career in the federal government. Throughout the last 20 years, she has worked in the Census Bureau, Treasury Department and on the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Trump claimed without evidence that the commissioner “faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory.”
The BLS routinely revises economic data such as the jobs report, GDP figures and inflation data. Due to the scale of the U.S. economy and response rates to surveys where BLS collects this data, there can often be lags in data collection. But that lag does not imply any wrongdoing or manipulation.
The politicization of economic data and potential interference with it by political appointees is something that’s typically seen in non-democratic countries like Russia, Venezuela or China.
Any erosion of trustworthy data can impact businesses, consumers, lending and policy makers. Historically, the United States’ economic data has been considered the gold standard due to the independence typically given to agencies that collect it.
The accuracy of government data collection has also been in question due to sweeping government job cuts.
Last August, the BLS said 818,000 fewer jobs had been created over a 12-month period than initially thought.
At the same time, Trump, who recently resumed attacking Fed Chair Jerome Powell, said that the central bank chief “should also be put ‘out to pasture.'”
Trump has repeatedly pressured Powell to lower interest rates. But Powell has said there’s still “a long way to go to really understand” what the effects of the president’s tariffs will be.
“If you move too soon, you wind up maybe not getting inflation all the way fixed and you have to come back. That’s inefficient. If you move too late, you might do unnecessary damage to the labor market,” Powell said on Wednesday.